Niagara Dry Beverages

This page contains Niagara Dry Beverages items. TODO: Write-up about Niagara Dry Beverages here.

Design Eras

Niagara Dry Beverages had several different design eras over its lifetime. A timeline of which design was used from what year(s) is not currently available, but I have done my best to hopefully piece together a somewhat proper timeline below. I could be very wrong.

"SWBW" Design

I'm calling this design era "SWBW", which stands for Spring Water Bottling Works. The only reason is because the company took their first Niagara Dry Ginger Ale label, which had "Spring Water Bottling Works" written along the bottom of the label, and swapped the text out to "Niagara Dry Beverages", back when they switched the company name.

"Rainbow Falls" Design

This design, as far as I can figure, seems to be the logical next step after the SWBW design. It came in two logo text variants, block and script. I speculate the script version came first, then the block version came after, due in part to the script logo labels not having any mention of the Cross of Honour up until the block logo.

"Borderless Rainbow Falls" Design

Initially, I had believed that this design came after the SWBW design, and before the Rainbow Falls design. Due to a few key details however, I believe this design came after the Rainbow Falls design, and before the Big Green design. One of the bottles in the gallery below (5th from the left) has 1955 written on the bottom label. According to a Niagara Review article written by Sherman Zavitz, Pepsi Canada purchased Niagara Dry Beverages in 1955. During this design era, a new slogan was adopted; "The family favourite".

"Blue Falls" Design

This design came around at some point after Pepsi acquired Niagara Dry Beverages. I am not sure where to place this design in terms of the general timeline, but the design gives me 1960's vibes. There's also the existence of the dual ACL/paper labelled bottles that lends credence to this design coming out before the Big Green design. At some point, they re-used a batch of the ACL 30oz bottles and paper-labelled them with the Big Green label. I have three of these dual labelled bottles, and if memory serves me correct, I've only ever seen 12 of them in total, and they were all owned by the gentleman I purchased the three from.

"Big Green" Design

The final design era of Niagara Dry Beverages. This era came along with plenty of new bottle size variants. At some point during this design era, the metric system was introduced to Canada. This can be seen in the introduction of "mL" on several bottles.

Likely due to the product potentially starting to be rolled out to Quebec (and beyond), some aspects of this design were also translated into French for Quebec, such as the small text on the sides of the bottle caps, and "OZ LIQ." (onces liquides) on some labels. The slogan "The traditional Ginger Ale" that was used on some of the items does not seem to have been translated to French, as I have never seen a French paper label. The only exception to this is the soda cans, where some cans were translated to read "Le Ginger Ale traditionnel".

A math lesson I learned while writing this up is that if you attempt to use an online calculator to check if the conversion between fluid ounces and millilitres is correct, you'll likely find that the numbers on the labels are incorrect. For example, converting 10 fluid ounces to millilitres gives us 296mL. But the 10oz bottle label shows 284mL. What gives? Turns out the fluid ounce measurements on these bottles are in UK fluid ounces, and not US fluid ounces. 1 US fl oz = 29.6 mL. 1 UK fl oz = 28.4mL.

No Deposit/No Return Bottles

During the Big Green design era, Niagara Dry Beverages experimented with shipping out 10oz No Deposit/No Return bottles to other provinces. There was also a smaller 200ml bottle produced at some point. The paper-labelled ND/NR bottles used a standard 10oz ND/NR bottle that multiple other soda/beer companies used, but Niagara Dry Beverages also had its own custom embossed 10oz ND/NR bottle.

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